For this Summer Session topic of celebrity, today we bring you Allegra Kirkland’s review of the 2013 Llyn Foulkes retrospective at the New Museum. Across all of his multi- and mixed-media works, Foulkes’ oeuvre holds a special fascination for the hollow promises of fame implicit in American popular figures, like Mickey Mouse and Clark Kent. His heavily textured style viscerally manifests the darkness beneath the saccharine[…..]

Llyn Foulkes ranks among that rare cadre of artists for whom fame is an optional extra. Over the course of his fifty-year career, the Los Angeles–based multimedia artist and musician has experienced periods of success—for his monumental Pop-influenced paintings of rocks and, decades later, for his zany, large-scale narrative tableaux. But much of his work has been met with silence from critics and buyers, allowing[…..]

For both Walt Disney and Llyn Foulkes, it all started with a mouse. Mickey, to be precise, accompanied both men throughout their respective careers—Disney in a manner of lucrative iconography, and Foulkes in a manner of psychological distress. To most, the cartoon rodent was the paragon of jubilant youth, but through Foulkes’ lens, Mickey was a sanitized, furtive representative of the rats infesting the politics,[…..]